How did Palantir build such a strong brand?

I co-founded Palantir in 2003/4 and worked there until 2009. Palantir’s brand emerged as a consequence of the people on its team, how it operates, and its core mission — the brand wasn’t something we worked on; in fact, there is probably still very little expertise in branding at all within Palantir. The brand is a reflection of the company itself.

We were lucky to start with some of the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley, and we were all proud of what we were working towards and spent a lot of time convincing other really talented people to join. When we found somebody truly great early on, even if it wasn’t 100% clear what his or her role would ultimately be, we’d find a place for them. Palantir was able to keep the bar immensely high both in terms of required talent and in terms of ‘people you’d want to work with’ — some early decisions to let talented but mean people go were probably really important in retrospect. And keeping the company culture meritocratic and decision-making distributed was natural for this sort of Silicon Valley team.

Combine this sort of team with a core company mission to work on and solve what we all felt were truly important problems for our society — protecting civil liberties, enabling collaboration within and between critical national security groups and other government and banking functions, convincing various government institutions of new and better ways of doing things to save hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on critical projects, etc. The technology was about ‘productizing a giant part of the IT services industry,’ but the mission was about stuff we really cared out.

And keep in mind, most of the other groups working on these problems at scale are big giant defense contractors with very different cultures who cannot hire the same type of talent and have been distorted by playing within ‘the military-industrial complex’ for decades — it’s useful for Palantir internally to define itself by what it is *not.*

With this core culture, it was a natural step for the team to do pro bono work with its technology systems with a certain percent of its time as opportunities present themselves — to help in Haiti or with hurricane Sandy response, with anti-human trafficking programs, or any number other of awesome applications that I see are meeting with great success. Even though Palantir’s becoming more financially successful every year, probably almost everybody in the company is aligned with the mission and identity of the company in such a way that solving important problems for the world is core. The team is very happy to be able to do important pro bono work even if it sometimes means slightly less revenue growth with those resources, because they are important problems that are aligned with what the company stands for. Ultimately, this is so important for the culture and identity of Palantir that it probably pays off in the long run anyway.

I will note that some of the different types of groups out there that, for example, lose a relatively wasteful billion dollar plus contract because of Palantir, oftentimes attempt to go after the company’s reputation, as you’d expect. And I’m glad to see that they have failed to stick much of this on the brand so far.

I don’t know much about brands, but I think they sometimes reflect the truth. When you have a company with a really strong sense of team and values that consistently impresses the people it interacts with, the brand might ultimately reflect that out in the real world too.

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